DJ Patil Goes to Washington

Wow, now that's impressive: DJ Patil has been named the First US Chief Data Scientist!

That is a long way from Snowbird and the Maryland–Penn State semi-annual workshop on dynamical systems and related topics.

Update: The Wired article drew heavily from the official announcement on the White House blog.

No Death Star For Us

Here is the US Government's response to a petition to build a Death Star by 2016. Very well played!

Jerry Brown is once again Governor of California

Looking at this from a bird's-eye view and without thinking about partisanship, Jerry Brown regaining the California governorship after serving from 1975-1983 is just a really neat story. And his campaign commercial inspired by Dos Equis beer is simply a big win.

The Sabermetrics of Health Care

Steve Van Hooser posted (an Facebook) a link to an interesting opinion article. This piece, which was published yesterday in the New York Times, was co-authored by Newt Gingrich, John Kerry, and (Oakland Athletics general manager) Billy Beane. Their point is a simple one: Let's use more statistical evidence to support the canonical reliance on 'expert opinions' (analogous to scouts) that essentially just call things as they see them. What one really needs is both of these things. (Yes, the US Health Care system was just compared to teams like the Baltimore Orioles that spend a lot of money but don't get very much for them. Or, to put it another way, our Health Care system has done a lot of things that are morally equivalent to overpaying for stiffs like Andruw Jones and Juan Pierre. It's an obvious observation, but I never really framed it using precisely that analogy before. Clearly, I should have.)

Spyspace

Here's the straight line (you provide the joke).

As reported in this article:

Later this month, intelligence community analysts will begin using A-Space, an online collaboration environment that officials hope will improve analysts’ abilities to share information, form communities and collaborate.... Like many social-networking sites, each analyst will create an online personal profile, and colleagues can see what others are working on and the A-Space workspaces that they are using.... A-Space analysts will have access to all information at the highest classification level that is accessible through the collaboration environment.

I would really love to apply community-detection techniques to that data set...

(Tip of the cap to Ben Williamson for pointing me to this article.)

Update on invasion of privacy

Courtesy Justin, here is some information on some very scary US Customs policies.

Comment: Way to go, guys! Friends, I think we're in the process of witnessing the slow, painful fall of an empire. (In fact, I can very easily picture President Bush in the White House playing a fiddle.)

Sigh... I guess I ought to get my laptop back first before I worry about it being seized unfairly at the border. Though apparently, it's anything that can be seized for no reason whatsoever. Maybe I ought to be more careful about my "unpatriotic science"?

Big Brother is Listening to you (and your musics)

Courtesy Christopher Voyce, here is a nice new invasion of privacy that is apparently under active discussion.

Comment:: Fuck you and the horse you rode in on! (Customs is supposed to protect people from things that are dangerous, not prevent them from drowning out obnoxious young children who sing the Fanta theme song for the bloody entirety of a six-hour long flight!)

Addendum: Writing "musics" was a typo, but it reminds me of a certain cat meme (and also whence it came), so I'm going to go with it. I meant to type "music", however. Damn governments have me all riled up... (not to mention the stress from my computer issues... my Mac passed its harddrive test, so we'll see how DiskWarrior does in a couple of days).

Voted off!

I showed up to my second day of jury duty this morning and was voted off (well, "kicked off" is more technically correct) within 15 minutes of the court going on record. And, as predicted by my friend Danny when I first got my summons, I essentially got voted off for being myself.

There are various ways one can get kicked off --- in my case, it was a peremptory decision by the defense attorney. People can get kicked off in various ways but after a few really obvious people were dumped in those matters, the prosecuting and defense attorney get to alternate in kicking people off. It was the prosecutor's turn first today and then the defense attorney kicked me off during his first turn. When he had questioned me on Friday, my predilection for devotion to logic and stubbornness (the ambiguous location of the word "devotion" is intentional) came through like a beacon of light. He asked me how comfortable I felt about facts that "come out of left field" as opposed to ones that follow a train of logical progression, and I answered truthfully that I am less comfortable with those. I assume that's why he didn't want me there --- I imagine some of the stuff he brings into evidence will have that flavor. I also commented on the arbitrariness (and thus essential meaninglessness) of the phrase "beyond a reasonable doubt", which is in part what I think led to the defense attorney's line of questioning in the first place.

When I left, my going through the walk of shame very much reminded me of seeing people do that when they get voted off in "The Weakest Link", which is why I like the 'voted off' phrasing of this whole thing. When I left my seat in the jury box, I accidently tripped while walking down the stairs, which I suppose was a bit fitting for me.

On Friday, I accidently did two things that were "awesome". I was supposed to answer about whether I had previous jury experience and I indicated that I have "no experience", which led to a comment by the judge about Caltech people being generally inexperienced in life. This was completely accidental (albeit accurate). The truly "awesome" moment, however, occurred a couple of minutes later when the judge asked me what subjects I study. I answered "math and physics" and the judge said I didn't have to dumb it down that much and that I should be more specific. So, I decided that I was just going to give the short buzzword statements of what my fields are (the type I put on my CV) and I answered "nonlinear dynamics and complex adaptive systems". The entire room immediately burst out in laughter; this includes the defendant, who was using a Spanish translator. The judge didn't bother asking me what these things actually are, which would have taken a bit of time to explain (which is why I decided to be short and sweet).

Anyway, no more jury duty for me for a very long time because I'll be living in the UK by the time I'd be eligible again.

The Gay Bomb

Last night, Lemming mentioned that a gay bomb was proposed by the U.S. military back in 1994. The gist is that the enemy soldiers who were hit by this would be given homosexual desires along with a major dose of aphrodisiac and would then be more interested in boinking their fellow soldiers than in fighting. Wow. You can read some more details here.

When Lemming first brought it up, I had assumed he was talking about a parody story. I did a double-take. (I was also playing Guitar Hero at the time, so I couldn't completely divert my attention to him.

The JASONs

I meant to write this post quite a while ago.

On Thursday, March 8th, the Caltech physics colloquium had its second historical/societal talk in a row. This time it was on a group known as the JASONa.

As stated in wikipedia, JASON is an independent group of scientists that advises the U.S. government on matters of science and technology. The group was first created as a way to get a younger generation of scientists — that is, not the older Los Alamos and MIT Radiation Laboratory alumni — involved in advising the government. It was established in 1960 and has somewhere between 30 and 60 members.

There are some Caltech profs who have been part of this and others who are rumored to be -- including some people in the audience for the talk, at least one of whom doesn't normally doesn't show up to physics colloquiua.

The talk, based on a book the speaker just published, was really interesting. It was also notable in several respects:

1. There were no visuals. The speaker is a historian, and apparently their tradition in talks is to read from stuff they wrote (with occasional skipping of paragraphs, sections, and so on).

2. This is the first physics colloquium I have ever seen in which the speaker used the word "fuck." She was quoting Murph Goldburger (as in "Murph Day"), who apparently was pretty crude in how he talked.

3. The oft-quoted "political policy is like sausage" made another appearance.

4. There was a nice euphemism about putting "people who understand our interests" in the group. I like that line.